The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second alpha
release of the K Desktop Environment. This release comes straight out of Glasgow,
the largest city in Scotland where aKademy is currently taking place.
Hundreds of KDE hackers are working like crazy to hunt down bugs, complete features
for KDE 4.0 and sit together developing and finishing new and exciting applications
for the new major version of the leading Free Desktop.

The most exciting new development is currently going on inPlasma, KDE 4's new shell for the desktop.
Plasma provides krunner, an application to directly launch programs and start other
tasks. Plasmoids are applets that display information such as the time, information about hardware
devices and also provide access to online resources, for example
showing RSS feeds, images or providing dictionary lookup.

System Settings, the replacement for kcontrol is an improved user interface hosting various modules for
configuring the desktop and other aspects of the system is another addition worth mentioning.

The upcoming weeks will be spent on further stabilizing and streamlining the underlying
KDE libraries to provide a stable interface for programmers for the whole KDE4 lifecycle.
Furthermore, the focus will shift to finishing the applications that are shipped with
the base desktop and polishing their user interfaces.

The end of July will see a full freeze of the kdelibs module, manifested in the first
beta release of KDE 4.0 with the final release currently planned for the end of October this year.

For the bravehearts who want to try KDE 4.0 Alpha2, please refer tothe alpha 2 info page
to find ways to have a peak at the current status yourself. As the pace of development
would outdate screenshots very quickly, the best way to find out about progress is to
refer to sites such as The Dot orPlanet KDE, the collection of KDE developers' weblogs.

Comments

The API is quite straightforward and it can be found from kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma (applet.h and dataengine.h iirc). The clock applet is located in kdebase/workspace/plasma/applets/clock or something and engines directory for the engine.

About the tutorial, I think Bas Grolleman is working on to get multi-part tutorial to the techbase, but at least there's nothing currently.

The DPI is way too high. I have a widescreen laptop and the screen is crammed.

Setting the DPI (after a long fight with every piece of the GUI) to 96 fixed the problem. I found that it was originally undefined. But the problem now is that I have to log out and then log back in to restart the desktop which was useless because the settings are forgotten.

DPI isn't a setting you change. It's a physical parameter: your resolution (in pixels) divided by your screen size (in inches). Change the resolution, the DPI changes too. The end result is that a 10pt font looks the same visually at 640x480, 800x600, 1600x1200 or any other resolution.

Just wanted to say, I made a VMWare Player image out of the KDE 4 alpha 2 LiveCD (available on demand :)) and I am VERY impressed with what the KDE developpers are on to. It's still alpha and not very stable, but the general feel of it is very, very smooth and polished. So thank you all for the excellent work. :)